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http://vook.tumblr.comTim Barrus: This is how I visualize the idea of obscurity. I do not know why.Papercuts: The New York TimesI doubt that the moderator at Paper Cuts will allow this. They rarely let me in. They're not receptive to real reciprocity. They want one or two words. They love lists. Not ideas. I submit there anyway.So allow us to briefly explore the definition of and the dynamics related to the word: OBSCURE.Wouldn't that be more productive than simply listing the names of a couple of books printed in 1902.Or is real discussion frowned upon.I don't understand what the word obscure means.The New York Times and book publishing are driven by numbers and lists. It is a pretense to insist that any other attribute (such as the word literary) could possibly be relevant.I note that book publishing itself is becoming much more honest, truthful, unimpeachable, authentic, and precise about everything from numbers of books sold to the unvarnished, unexaggerated, unerring, and unaffected stories it tells as all who toil and sweat in this scrupulous business strive as best we can to maintain the veracious sheen-of-sham and hocus pocus so inherently attached like Superglue to our equivocated reputations for flimflam and fiddle-dee-dee.If certain books are obscure whose fault is it, and how can we change that. Blame...The publishers in their comfortable New York offices and Manolo Blahniks. The editors in their comfortable New York offices and Manolo Blahniks. Or the agents in their comfortable New York offices and Manolo Blahniks. Perhaps what we really need is a list of books that deserve to be obscure.Obviously, my books would be at the top of that distinguished computer print out.It is always enough to rattle off the names of a couple of books we read in 1925 on blogs that aren't really invested in any reciprocity between blog and reader.Why is it we never want to look underneath that literary skin too deeply. What makes a book obscure.I would suggest that the process begins with the agent. I note with some chagrin that the way agents reject books that ultimately get published anyway, typically employ paradigms as molds that are subject to the whims of fashion. As is the entire notion of what an obscure book is.In the past, agents would just say: we are all overworked here and have no more time for books. Since 2006, and the Great Leap Forward, agents getting back to obscure writers (like moi) writing obscure books (people still tell me that my title Genocide was a rotten title for a book) all now say EXACTLY the same lame thing: we would have no idea as to how to sell this book.Finally (drum roll), the truth.Thusly some of us have stopped writing obscure books whose numbers typically reach two figures thanks to a reading public set on fire with enthusiasm for the same old tired thing published by the same old tired houses. Instead of writing books the agents all scream at us no one will read, we are creating VOOKS whose obscurity remains to be determined.Once again, technology is changing the very idea of what obscurity means.Personally, I have fallen in love with the video camera as a vehicle to tell a story. How many VOOKS anywhere in the process of production have had their literary video content created by the same people who wrote the narration.The real issue is that the reader is now exposed to a far more intimate -- if obscure -- experience in terms of what the writer was reaching for versus an ordinary (obscure) house contracting with a Hollywood machine cranking out ordinary (obscure) content. Give the writer the camera and tell him to rock and roll.Imagine: Philip K. Dick, certainly obscure by the publishing standards of his day now has access to

• Release Date

  Nov 11, 2009

• Runtime

  00:28